hello, i'm making this as an announcement/blog post with some general commentary about this community, and its future.

when i started this community i was hoping to get a similar kind of community engagement as the original sub on reddit. i made posts with lengthy commentaries and the whole works.. but i suppose that was naive, as a lot of threadiverse users don't even realize what community they're commenting in half the time and are just reacting to the headline and text that shows up in their home feed. unlike reddit, which has a harder line between subs, the threadiverse tends to be perceived as a whole by its users. that and, to be frank, i've started becoming disillusioned with r/politicaloptimism for various reasons that aren't important to get into, so i don't mind steering this community in a slightly different direction.

so for these reasons, i want to change things around here.

i am changing how flairs work. i realize flairs only show up on the piefed side. it's silly to keep using "optimistic post" on everything. especially since a lot of piefed users take it as a challenge to set me straight every single time, and double especially since there's no way to enforce flair rules like on reddit, having a catch-all flair is pointless. i don't know why i kept it up for as long as i did. flairs will remain, but their purpose will change. flairs about specific things like "election result" can still be useful to the users who can use them.

this is an opinionated community, in the sense that what counts as "optimistic" news follows similar values:

• democracy
• environmentalism
• wealth redistribution
• science & technology
• humanitarianism
• lgbtq+ rights
• freedom
• anti-fascism
• anti-monopoly

off the top of my head at least.. i'll try to keep the list updated as the rest comes to me. i think a list of bullet points is better than saying any specific ideology. i don't want this community to become a circlejerk for a specific ideology or political party. instead, it can be a circlejerk for specific values, heh.

i want this community, at the very least, to exist as a service to those who want less doom and gloom in their news, and to see progress; politically, culturally, economically, or environmentally. feel free to snag the rss feed and completely ignore engaging with the community itself lol. if you want to help, the posting guidlines still apply.

reiterating and clarifying comment rules:

1. no doom
2. no fafo
3. don't celebrate death
4. no trolling/snarking
5. cynicism and skepticism is fine, but if it gets too aggressive, i'll delete the comment.
6. comment threads that get too argumentative will be locked or deleted.

so, for now, that's my plan. i'm leaving comments turned on for this post, to see if anyone has any opinions or suggestions. like i said, i'm breaking the mold of r/politicaloptimism and am willing to entertain new ideas right now.